Ha·ley  (hā'lē)  American writer best known for Roots (1976), a fictionalized chronicle tracing his family history back to its African origins. |
An African-American author who became famous for his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Haley combined fact and fiction in tracing his family's history to his ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was kidnaped in Africa in the eighteenth century and taken as a slave to America.
Note: The great popularity of Roots, which also became a television series, was part of the growing interest in the 1970s and 1980s in multiculturalism.